The Last Persephone
by BizarreSerenity
Summary: After buying a mirror from the Salvation Army, Korra begins to hear creepy whispering at night. Written for Day One: Mythology of Amorra Week. AmonxKorra.


"And this is why thrift stores are amazing." Korra exclaimed, as she tightened the last screw on the hook now bolted firmly onto the wall.

She set the screwdriver down on her bedside table and gently lifted the old lacquered mirror from its newspaper nest on her bed, and hung it from its peg onto the wall hook.

The mirror was an old, antique piece she had picked up from the Salvation Army earlier that evening, made out of polished and carved black lacquer. The glass was slightly foggy and pitted from the inside, but it was pretty, and the one thing Korra's new apartment had lacked was a mirror for her bedroom.

"Only ten bucks _and_ I found a hook for it." She crowed, buffing the dust out of the glass with an old dusting rag and some Windex. Soon the glass was shining, despite the speckling of age in the backing.

Her face was reflected in near perfect clarity, from her long brown hair pulled back from her face, to the blue of her eyes, and the tanned, mocha tone that was her skin.

All and all, it was a good deal.

She gave the mirror one last buff for good measure with the rag before waltzing off to her little kitchen to make dinner for herself, smiling at her reflection before leaving the room.

She did not, however, see the glimmer of ice and slitted shadow flicker across the surface when her bedroom door closed.

~X~X~X~X~

"And this is the living room." Korra said, sweeping her arm to emphasize the worn but comfortable couches, impressive entertainment system, and traditional tribal decorations from her home state. "You've seen every room except for mine. Nothing much to see there, anyway."

Bolin and Mako flopped down onto one of the couches and Korra sat down on the other, tossing the TV remote to Bolin so that he could pick something to watch. Korra's extensive DVD collection sat stacked in a tower she'd built in High School Shop Class, and Bolin instantly got up, gave the remote to Mako, and went over to pick out a DVD instead.

"You know, I have Cable now." Korra said, as Bolin pawed through her DVDs.

He snorted, and held a Blueray disk aloft.

"Yeah, but The Fifth Element on Blueray isn't on TV!"

"Dork!"

~X~X~X~X~

After her little housewarming party was over Korra had the annoying, exhausting chore of cleaning up all of the spilt popcorn and empty bottles of cactus juice, as well as calling a taxi for the 'Fabulous Bending Brothers' as Bolin and Mako liked to call themselves after they'd had way too much to drink.

Korra knew the boys owed her big time for calling and paying for a cab instead of waking up Mako's girlfriend, Asami, to come get them. Mako would've slept on the couch for at least a week, and she was pretty sure that Asami wouldn't be too happy with Bolin, either.

So after her living room looked livable again, Korra dragged herself off to bed, shedding pieces of butter stained, liquor splashed clothing as she crossed her bedroom and slid beneath the crisp, clean blue sheets.

She could've cried at how good it felt to finally sleep in a _bed_ again, instead of just a mattress on a floor. The Salvation Army had not only had the mirror, but also her bed frame, the couches, and the kitchen table, all of which, save for the mirror, she had picked up a few days before.

No, the mirror had just been a sort of whim when she and Asami picked up the couches that day, and Korra smiled at it, feeling just a tiny bit crazy as she did.

Then she snuggled down into her pillows and fluffy down comforter, and slept.

~X~X~X~X~

_Once, there was a goddess._

_A minor goddess, really, the daughter of the harvest. The goddess of springtime, who spent all her days frolicking in the field with nymphs, with not a care in the world._

_She was beautiful, if you liked the type: Blonde, busty and willowy, with a musical tone to her laughter and lips as soft as rose petals. She was innocent in all ways of both men and women._

_Untouched._

_And that was made her so irresistible._

_She was tainted by nothing, knew no displeasure, nor suffering or sickness._

_Pure._

X~X~X~X~

Life was hectic for Korra.

It was late to bed and early to rise for the young college student, and for a martial arts slash physical education major with a Teaching Assistant job on the side, Korra was absolutely exhausted when she was finally able to strip down, shower, and slip into bed.

So at first, she thought the whispers were just a crazy sort of hallucination brought on by exhaustion and being half asleep. You know, the kind you might get when you're really tired and still sort of thinking about things before you finally drift off to sleep.

But it was after the second week of night filled whispers that Korra had finally come to realize that something odd was happening.

So after a day of working out, studying, going to class and helping the Teen Judo Class through yet another practice Korra made her mind up.

She was not going to sleep until she got rid of the whispering.

Korra took extra time in the shower that night, combing conditioner through her long hair before rinsing and drying off, taking extra care to bind her hair up in the traditional, tribal style she had always worn even when she was a little kid: One big ponytail in the back, and too little ones in the front.

She dressed for bed but instead on snuggling down and going to sleep, Korra sat up in the dark, and listened.

X~X~X~X

"_You can hear me, can't you?"_

It wasn't a second after Korra had given up on hearing the whispering voice that she heard it again, but not before she had groggily crawled beneath her covers in search of a good night's sleep.

She sat bolt upright, clutching her comforter around her, and felt around, blind in the dark, for the lamp that sat on her bedside table.

"Obviously!" She huffed, still unsure if she had actually heard the voice. "I wouldn't have been sitting here waiting for you if I hadn't heard you all those nights before! Are you the upstairs neighbor or something? Are you talking through the vents?"

She was referring to the paper thin walls and the air ducts that ran through the apartments, and the neighbors on the floor above her and below her. They were all college students like Korra; the apartments were rented out exclusively to students at Republic City University only down the street from the complex. Sometimes they were loud, and that just had to be it.

One of Korra's neighbors was creeping on her.

She finally found the lamp and jerked its chain, filling the room with a soft glow that allowed Korra to slip out of bed and pad over to the vent in the wall across the room without tripping over something and killing herself.

Korra pressed her ear to the cold piece of metal, her feeling the cool AC tickle her ear though the slits in the vent.

"_No." _ The voice answered, amused. _"Not through the vents._"

Korra immediately jerked away from the vent and turned at the sound of the man's voice again, rich and deep and not at all coming from the air vent.

The voice came from the other side of the room, closer to her bed and her new mirror than to where she stood.

"Oh. Well can you quiet down? I'm trying to sleep, and I have class early tomorrow morning?" Korra asked loudly, hoping that her neighbor could hear her and let her go to sleep.

The voice chuckled, making the hair at Korra's neck and arms prickle.

"_As_ _you wish._"

X~X~X~X~

_One day the Springtime goddess picked a flower in the meadow. _

_It was a strange flower, and not a new occurrence to the goddess at all, for she was a nature goddess, and wore flowers in her long gold hair year round. _

_But this flower was a new flower, with blood red petals and a sweet, rich scent that reached her even by the swiftly flowing river._

_The goddess plucked the flower with a smile and tucked it behind her ear, not noticing the absence of birdsong and laughter around her._

_The earth then split in two, jagged, gaping sides, and out came a chariot pulled by a team of black horses, carrying the devil himself._

X~X~X~X

"I'm telling you, it was my neighbor! I bet he's some creepy nerd or something." Korra complained as she flipped another pancake high into the air only to have it land expertly back into the frying pan. "He's been whispering at night, and I finally heard him a few days ago."

Korra finished fixing their midnight snack and brought plates heavily laden with bacon and pancakes over to the dinner table where Bolin, Mako, and Asami sat, waiting and hungry after yet another study session.

"I bet he's just lonely." Asami said, daintily cutting her pancakes into little pieces before dousing them in syrup. "You should go on over and say hello, and invite him to study with us."

Korra scowled, and shoved a bite of pancake into her mouth.

"Yeah, invite him over!" Bolin agreed, around a mouthful of bacon. "We're coming back over tomorrow anyway."

Mako scowled with her, and Korra _knew _he hated the idea as much as she did, but Bolin and Asami weren't going to let it go.

She sighed, and finished her food.

X~X~X~X

The next day she found herself excused from TA work, and, after being bugged by Asami and Bolin, went upstairs to invite her neighbor to study later that night.

She climbed the stairs, nervous to basically confront the creepy whisperer again, but didn't hesitate to knock as soon as she made her way over to his door.

She rapped firmly and loudly on the wooden door, and then stood back, hands behind her back and rocking on her heels.

It was only a moment before she heard the chain locks jingle, and the door open.

"Hello?"

Korra's blood went cold as she faced a girl her age, a girl with short brown hair and glasses that _definitely _didn't sound like the whispering voice she had heard all those nights ago.

"Oh, sorry." Korra apologized, backing up into the hallway. "I think I have the wrong unit! Sorry!"

Missing the girl's puzzled stare Korra ran down the stairs, her heart pounding.

If the upstairs neighbor was a girl, then where had the voice come from?

X~X~X~X

An hour later Korra was even more confused than she had been before.

After visiting her downstairs neighbor as well, (Who _was_ a dude but had a squeaky voice that didn't belong to the guy Korra was now calling The Whisperer) she was thoroughly creeped out. Both neighbors didn't hear any whispering (She'd gone upstairs again, embarrassed, and asked her neighbor)and no one knew a deep voiced guy in their building.

Korra was then sure that her late night study sessions with her friends and way too much homework were taking their toll on her, and ended it with that.

But she still wondered in the back of her mind.

Where had the voice come from?

X~X~X~X~

_The spring goddess, named Persephone, wept for days._

_She ate nothing and drank nothing that Hades, the lord of the dead, known by some to be the devil, brought her. She did not wear the beautiful silks he brought to her, nor did she weave flowers in her hair. They soon began to wilt, and Persephone with them._

_Finally, on the brink of starvation, Persephone ate six pomegranate seeds pried freshly from the fruit. Her hands were stained red and her fate with it: She was doomed to spend six months in the Underworld with Hades as his wife, and the other six above ground with her mother and the other gods._

_It was so decreed by the king of all gods, and Persephone was trapped._

_X~X~X~X~_

Korra was so bothered by 'the tale of the whisperer' (As Bolin called it) that she sat up in bed a night later, determined to get down to the bottom of the whole thing.

She sat in bed, fully dressed, and gathered up her courage.

"Hey whispering guy!" She called, cupping her hands around her mouth. "Are you still creepily listening to me?"

Not expecting a reply Korra flopped onto her back, feather pillows invitingly cool beneath her head, and sighed. No, talking to a strange voice in her head wasn't weird at all, she thought. She had probably been really tired those nights, and just dreamed the whole thing.

That was it, just a dream.

"_There is no need to shout._"

Korra nearly jumped a foot into the ear, scrambling in a tangle of legs, sheets, and pillows off of her bed and into the middle of the room. She managed to trip and fall into a heap of blue sheets and mussed, loose hair, and groaned.

"Why couldn't you have just been a dream?" She complained, yanking the tangled sheets away from her legs. "I need my beauty sleep, you know! I have a job and class and a life!"

There was the chuckled again, and Korra felt chilled all over.

"_So I have seen."_

Korra stood, kicking the sheets and pillows away, and tried to ignore the obvious taunt, the way he tried to imply that he had been watching her. He was just some lonely nerd that was probably her upstairs neighbor's boyfriend, (Or her downstairs neighbor's boyfriend) that just wanted to mess with her.

She was probably making his night.

"Where are you, anyway?" Korra demeaned, fists clenched. "Upstairs? Downstairs? Listening at my door?"

The room was eerily silent, and Korra saw a flash of blue and red in the corner of her eye.

"_At the moment," _ The voice drawled smoothly, darkly, _"In your bedroom mirror."_

X~X~X~X~

_Hades loved his wife, but Persephone was anything but a happy, willing partner._

_She locked herself in their bedroom, naked, crumbling dead flowers still weaved in her long tangled hair. She did not eat, drink, or sleep. _

_Persephone only wept, her hands pressed to the stone walls, trying to summon forth flowers and fruit and wheat to no avail._

_And slowly, bit by bit, Hades watched as his wife faded away until there was nothing left but the ghost of old flowers, a cloying scent of dead roses._

_It was Hades' turn to weep, and the dead wept along with him at the loss of their queen._

X~X~X~X~

Korra watched in growing horror and amazement as a face began to slowly fade into focus, first like a blurry photograph, but then into crystal clear quality in her mirror.

He was beautiful, and he was terrible.

His skin was dark, like hers, but it seemed to shine with an otherworldly light that didn't belong there in the mortal coil. His eyes were like fire and ice, one second a frosty blue sheen, the next a riot of crimson and gold licks of flame that danced and crackled like whips. Dark hair was slicked back, cut jaggedly at his earlobes.

The image seemed to flicker for a moment, and Korra watched with a horrible sort of anticipation as the eyes followed hers, and flicked down her body, as If they could see her.

And they _could_ see her, because he smirked, even as she tried to cover herself.

She was dressed but she was dressed for bed in just a long, old shirt of Bolin's stamped with their old high school wrestling team's logo of a proud striped Fire Ferret. It barely skimmed the top of her thighs, leaving a large expanse of tanned skin and muscled legs on display.

"_But you see I am everywhere, and I am nowhere._" He continued, his voice rumbling like thunder. "_I am in your bedroom and I am down below, in our kingdom."_

Korra's blood turned to ice, and she found herself frozen in fear.

_Our_ kingdom, he said.

"_You'll learn to love me."_ He coaxed, as a hand pressed against the glass, the surface rippling and parting like water, reaching out to knot strong, powerful hands into her hair. _" You will be a magnificent Queen. You will never fade away, never throw away what I will give to you. You're much stronger then she was, Korra."_

Slowly, inch by inch, her face was brought to his.

"_Korra." _He whispered, her name falling sweetly, almost hypnotizing between them. _"You will be my Persephone."_

X~X~X~X~

_And from the mortal world came a young woman, born and bred in nothing but normality._

_Blessed with the gift of fire and water she became a goddess, a just queen, though she was ripped from her home and her life by the very hands of death._

_Six months below with her new husband was spent,_

_And six months above with her mortal family._

_This Queen would not fade._

_This Persephone would be the last._


End file.
